StumbleUpon Is Back To Being A Startup

Social Book marking site, StumbleUpon has broken free from ebay and become independent again. StumbleUpon was in the folds of Ebay for nearly two years after in 2007 Ebay acquired it for $74 million.
"After nearly two years as a subsidiary of eBay, today StumbleUpon returns to being an independent company. StumbleUpon is now backed by myself and co-founder Geoff Smith, along with several great investors who’ve backed companies such as Google and Facebook."
Hope they can stay up strong among services like DIGG.
StumbleUpon Blog

Tags: social bookmarking, StumbleUpon, digg

New Web Hosting Reference Social Network, HostingBookmarks.com Launched

Looks like every nook and corner of the Internet is becoming a part of a Social Network or a niche social network, attracting users based on their needs or attractions. Sort of like yeateryears BBS'.
NewswireToday - /newswire/ - New York City, NY, United States, 12/30/2007 - Web hosting industry has already have its own social networking web site Hosting Bookmarks. It has been launched last week.

The purpose of the web site is far different from collecting commercial news about products and services that companies add to their hosting plans. The website aims organize various hosting topics and knowledge into a database. The new hosting reference network welcomes professionals involved in hosting industry to create profiles and to add articles, opinions, analysis, tutorial and help related content that would be useful to the community. The founder of the web site is the owner of DawHB hosting blog Dimitar Avramov. He is one of the known bloggers in web hosting industry.

"HostingBookmarks.com web site is not a technology innovative platform. In some way it is "just another social network" build on Pligg free content management system which power many social networking websites", says Mr. Avramov. He has however added that he believes it is important for hosting community to have a well-organized reference website where different people share their web hosting experience.

"When you changed a few web hosts, when you used different Control panels you know many things which you can share with others", says Dawhb.com blog's owner. He reveals that the idea to launch Hosting Bookmarks came when he was searching for quality blogs that cover various aspects of web hosting.

"I realized that I wasn't able to find good web hosting content within the popular social networks where people go mainly to have fun or to promote their blogs or websites. Then I decided to build a place where website business and web hosting addicted could bookmark, store, read, and search for various content by different categories and keywords", says also the founder of Hosting Bookmarks.

The new web hosting reference and social network site also invites tech bloggers who has experience in web hosting to bookmark valuable content and to share it with others.

"I would like to encourage you to create account in HostingBookmarks.com and to build good profile. This will help many people to find answers on many questions related to hosting industry" is the message that the founder of Hosting bookmarks send to his fellow bloggers.
tag: social network, Social networking, bbs, blogger, HostingBookmarks, Pligg

The best social networking news sources according to Notifir!

I was at notifir.com applying for a beta account, Notifir is an upcoming service that lets you track and manage some of your social bookmarking accounts from one central location. The site is launching its private beta tomorrow. Mashable has seen it already (envy envy);Notifir To Launch Digg Tracker
But the idea for this post comes from a post on notifir blog.

1. TechCrunch.com
2. Mashable.com
3. Topix.net
4. TechNewsWorld.com
5. Digg.com
6. Reddit.com
7. Netscape.com
8. StumbleUpon.com
9. Google News (you may want to set a Google Alert for each social network you want to follow)
10. SethGodin.com

If you think that the list is incomplete, poster says to leave links as a comment.
I would add Technorati

Tags: social bookmarking, Social networking, social networking news, notifir, mashable

FEEDoTopia: Feedotopia, social bookmarking and RSS

RSS FEEDs in Social Bookmarking? or just a marketing bluf?

FEEDoTopia: Feedotopia, social bookmarking and RSS

Tags: social bookmarking, promotion via RSS, Feedotopia

New Social Networking site Wis.dm launches.

Wis.dm has been in development for a little over 9 months and on May 3rd they launched wis.dm,according to wis.dm, a valuable extension to your online social experience. They also state that the vision behind wis.dm is simply to enable you to ask, share, grow and learn as a part of a rich and vibrant community. The premise is a simple question which you can ask to test the balance of opinion on something in particular or to prompt wide interaction amongst the community, all curious and excited by challenging questions and interesting discourse.

But according to bizjournals.com, Not everyone is enthusiastic. Mashable, a social networking news site, described it as "two years too late to the bookmarking game."

Check out for your self; you may gain some wis.dm

Tags: Social networking, wis.dm, social bookmarking

Diigo (dee'go) gives you 'social annotation'

But I will call it more than annotation. Because Diigo team have managed to bring together social bookmarking, clippings, in situ annotation, tagging, full-text search, easy sharing and interactions, together into a single product. Diigo offers a powerful personal tool and a rich social platform for knowledge users, and in the process, turns the entire web into a writable, participatory and interactive media.
I have been using many a tools to do what Diigo offers and I am enjoying it very much and I have just began.
My research, either for my numerous weblogs or my physics classes, I can do with Diigo. Get the tool bar to make it really useful.
Diigo is here

Tags: social bookmarking, social annotation, Diigo, social bookmarking, clippings, in situ annotation, tagging, full-text search, easy sharing

Socialize your blogger blog

You have seen Social bookmarking icons to let readers bookmark a post or a site. Usually there are 10-12 tiny icons on a blog. Now Socializer by ekstreame.com has put most of those icons together and created a single icon to be put on sites. See the diagram below.



I came across socializer while searching for information on social networking. The socializer lead me to "We Fix Your Gadgets" where Evan Spiegel explains how to embed socializer in to Blogger sites. Which I will follow to add socializer to this site. But if you are on new blogger, or blogger beta as it was know a little while ago, you may want to visit "The alpha project"

But I am going to change the way both sites host the image, I will host the image on blogger itself. How? I will add the image to this post and then use the URL of the image in my template mod.

links;
We Fix Your Gadgets: Socializer, automatic submission of social bookmarks
Ryan Marle - The Alpha Project: Socializer - Social Bookmarking on Blogger Beta
Socializer

Tags: social bookmarking, socializer

The Wisdom of Crowds, they are tagging the world

The iNG, the link provided below, lead me to an superb article;
"The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging" on INFOTANGLE by by Ellyssa Kroski. Just the bibliography provided is just enough for you
This is an excellent article that anyone interested in social networking, folksnomy must read. If you don't know folksnomy from a folksong, like my dictionary then it is great introduction to folksnomy as well. Just the bibliography provided is just enough for you bookmark this article under one of your social bookmarking sites.
The article, some content that I do not agree has gems of paragraphs like;
"User-Based Tagging and Folksonomies
Unlike social-networking sites such as LinkedIn and Friendster, which concentrate on developing relationships, social sites such as del.icio.us, 43Things and Flickr focus their attention on organizing data. Users organize their own or other’s data in the public sphere and the social, or community, aspects arise from there as users share and seek out like-minded individuals."
That get your thinking cap's propeller turning. I enjoyed the article. Also knowing that Technorati has 21 million blogs to track and about 3 million tags, I happy to know that I introduced my own tags. Like the latest, Joosting, watching videos through Joost. Joosting is a common name in western Europe (The Netherlands, Belgium) but Now I have tagged it to communications through this article in VoIP IP Telephony.
While you are at it enjoy the tiny tag cloud of weseepeople, displayed on left, which is a tiny part of global tag cloud. Check my tags for this artcle below!!

Links;
Hive Mind, must read folksnomy article by Ellyssa Kroski
info NeoGnostic: The Wisdom of Crowds
VOIP IP Telephony: Joost invite is here, and I am Joosting!

Tags: folksnomy, tag, tag cloud, Folksonomies, hive, LinkedIn, Friendster, del.icio.us, 43Things, Flickr, technorati, joosting, joost